irrationality of certain strongpstrong-adic periods for small strongpstrong.pdfVIP

IMRN International Mathematics Research Notices 2005, No. 20 Irrationality of Certain p-adic Periods for Small p Frank Calegari 1 Introduction ´ Apery’s proof [13] of the irrationality of ζ(3) is now over 25 years old , and it is perhaps surprising that his methods have not yielded any significant new results (although fur- ther progress has been made on the irrationality of zeta values [1, 14]). Shortly after the ´ initial proof, Beukers produced two elegant reinterpretations of Apery’s arguments; the first using iterated integrals and Legendre polynomials [2], and the second using modu- lar forms [3]. It is this second argument that we will apply to study the irrationality of certain p-adic periods, in particular, the p-adic analogues of ζ(3) and Catalan’s constant for small p . To relate certain classical periods to modular forms, Beukers considers var- ious integrals of holomorphic modular forms that themselves satisfy certain functional equations (analogous to the functional equation for the nonholomorphic Eisenstein se- ries of weight two). That these integrals satisfy functional equations is a consequence of the theory of Eichler integrals. The periods arise as coefficients of the associated period polynomials. In our setting, these auxiliary functional equations are replaced by the no- tion of overconvergent p-adic modular forms [6, 7, 10]. In this guise, our p-adic periods will occur as coefficients of overconvergent Eisenstein series of negative integral weight. These p-adic periods are equal to special values of Kubota–Leopoldt p-adic L-functions. Thus ζ(3) is replaced by ζp (3) = Lp (3, id) and Catalan’s constant ∞ n G = L(2, χ) = (−1) 2